Ramadan evening binge..... Koran chapter 16: the bee

 

This is how it's been since 2017. As soon as my brother Jose(ph Stalin) died five years to the day before the Ukraine war started. It falls around April every year.

Every year I cheat, drinking tea and coffee with milk and sugar or sweetener. But I still honor the not eating part. Some years I've started eating half an hour early or whatever coz I was extremely hungry.

So far it's been three days and today I binged again. The thing is that after I binge in the evenings there's no time or space for anymore overeating so it's bedtime and then nothing but coffees all day. It's like this for a month so you shed ten pounds of body fat easily.

Anyway this year day two something new happens. I'd never been effectively stung by a bee or wasp in any meaningful way but then I got stung yesterday. Possibly twice I can't remember. It's possible there's a hive nearby I'll find out next time I'm at that garden.

Anyway my eye got all puffy, the left eye. Maybe I'll get a pill for it. It's still pretty puffy now. It's a bit itchy. It stung under the eyeball.

So I was learning recently how some fungi can take over an ant's brain and use it as food, killing it. Same thing it turns out with many wasps. They can stun a cockroach with one kind of venom then mind control its brain with a different kind of venom, turning it into a dumb living host for its larvi. Families and real estate.

Then I remembered there's an entire chapter of the Koran called 'the Bee '. And various references to bees,

Verse 68:
And your Lord inspired the bee [saying]: ‘Make your home in the mountains, and on the trees and the trellises that they erect. 

Verse 69:
Then eat from every [kind of] fruit and follow meekly the ways of your Lord.’ There issues from its belly a juice of diverse hues, in which there is a cure for the people. There is indeed a sign in that for a people who reflect. 

73. And yet they serve besides God what possesses no provisions for them in the heavens, nor on earth, nor are they capable.

74. So do not cite the examples for God. God knows, and you do not know.

75. God cites the example of a bonded slave, who has no power over anything; and someone to whom We have given plentiful provision, from which he gives secretly and openly. Are they equal in comparison? All praise belongs to God, but most of them do not know.

76. And God cites the example of two men: one of them dumb, unable to do anything, and is a burden on his master; whichever way he directs him, he achieves nothing good. Is he equal to him who commands justice, and is on a straight path?

77. To God belongs the unseen of the heavens and the earth. The coming of the Hour is only as the twinkling of the eye, or even nearer. God has power over everything.